I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
But given that, if you write a post that's really low quality and immediately get half a dozen hearts, it's going to reinforce the idea that you can continue to write crap. Not that we have much low quality stuff here (yet...), I'm saying that encouragement is only good when it's genuine encouragement from people who appreciate you. If we start taking things for granted we're back to the point where nobody need get anything at all.
But given that, if you write a post that's really low quality and immediately get half a dozen hearts, it's going to reinforce the idea that you can continue to write crap. Not that we have much low quality stuff here (yet...), I'm saying that encouragement is only good when it's genuine encouragement from people who appreciate you. If we start taking things for granted we're back to the point where nobody need get anything at all.
Yeah, that's a fair point. I suppose "encouragement" hearts should ideally be paired with actual feedback.